Mike Adams versus the 10:23 Campaign

He starts by saying that sceptics do not understand homeopathy because our worldview is insufficiently elevated:

It requires an elevated worldview

Teaching the so-called “skeptics” about how homeopathic medicine really works is a bit like trying to convince flat Earthers that the planet is really spherical. These skeptics, you see, approach homeopathy as if it were a drug (because that’s all they really know). And in their world, all drugs are dangerous if you overdose on them, which makes sense from their point of view because they’re educated solely in dangerous, synthetically-derived chemicals that are incompatible with the human body.

Medicine is intended to have an effect on the body. The body’s biochemical processes are complicated and interconnected so effecting one chemical pathway is going to effect others. That is why drugs can have side-effects. In such cases patients and their doctors have to decide whether the benefits outweigh the side-effects when deciding on whether or not a particular therapy should be administered. Homeopaths ignore all this, prefering their reductionist worldview that administering magic sugar pills to eliminate a symptom will make the illness go away.

Homeopathy, you see, isn’t a drug. It’s not a chemical. So you can drink all you want and you won’t overdose on it. That’s not a defect in homeopathy — it’s a remarkable advantage! It means that while 200,000+ Americans are killed each year by toxic pharmaceutical drugs, no one is harmed by homeopathy. Not even those who are desperately trying to be harmed by it!

I am not sure whether Adams is deliberately misinterpreting the campaign or is too stupid to understand it. The campaigners are not “desperately trying to be harmed” by homeopathy, they are showing that it has no effect on the body.

That’s the way ignorant conventional medicine operates today: You know the drugs are kicking in when you start getting worse.

Wrong again. As I recall, it is homeopaths who explain the persistance and/or worsening of symptoms after administering their nostrums as a “healing crisis”.

But homeopathy isn’t a chemical. It’s a resonance. A vibration, or a harmony. It’s the restructuring of water to resonate with the particular energy of a plant or substance.

How is water “restructured”? What evidence is there that substances and plants have particular ‘energies’ that can restructure water? None.

We can get into the physics of it in a subsequent article…

Make it soon. I’m looking forward to reading and fisking it.

…but for now it’s easy to recognize that even from a conventional physics point of view, liquid water has tremendous energy, and it’s constantly in motion, not just at the molecular level but also at the level of its subatomic particles and so-called “orbiting electrons”…

So won’t this constant motion constantly restructure the water and destroy the ‘memory’ of anything the water has been in contact with?

…which aren’t even orbiting in the first place. Electrons are vibrations and not physical objects.

I am not sure what the relevence of this is, unless he is saying:

1. Physicists have demonstrated that electons (which are real) are vibrations

2. Homeopaths assert that homeopathy is a vibration

3. Therefore homeopathy is real. Therefore it works.

To show the fallacy in this thinking, consider this:

1. Evolution scientists have demonstrated that birds are descended from dinosaurs.

2. Tyrannosaurus rex was a dinosaur

3. Therefore birds are tyrannosaurs.

The skeptics don’t know that yet. That won’t be taught that in university physics classes until probably 2020

I don’t know what the significance of 2020 is but in any event, I was taught it in physics classes in the late 1970s.

It’s hilarious, in fact, that those who would try to disparage homeopathy would even think that attempting to “overdose” on it proves anything at all. What it really shows is that they utterly lack any understanding of the underlying theories of how homeopathy works…

There are no theories as to how homeopathy is supposed to work, there are only unevidenced assertions. Which we do understand and furthermore we understand that they are absurd and do not match reality.

For example: let us consider the symptom of “not being on fire”. Since fire extinguisher foam puts out fires, by the Law of Similars, administering homeopathic extinguisher foam will cure something not burning. So get some extinguisher foam, go through the serial diutions and magic banging routine until you have something really powerful – say 100C. Then flush it down the loo. If the homeopaths are right the methane gas in the sewers will catch fire. So stand back – your loo is going to flare off. If the homeopaths’ assertions are correct.

…theories that Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier — the discovered (sic) of the AIDS virus — now publicly supports, by the way.

More fallacious thinking; this time arguing from authority. It does not matter who supports any particular assertion. What matters is the evidence. Anyway, I thought that homeopaths didn’t believe in the germ theory of disease.

These public demonstrations of chugging what they call “drugs” can only be called psychopathic “public suicide attempts” — and they can’t even get that right, either. (They’re drinking the wrong stuff…)

Looks like he’s now trying the approach of “what I tell you three times is true”.

In fact, if these skeptics are looking to kill themselves…

He is.

…they need look no further than the tens of thousands of toxic drugs, vaccines, chemotherapy agents, radiation procedures and barbaric surgical procedures that they claim will heal you! Yep, the stuff they say is good for you is the stuff they won’t drink.

Sceptics are not saying that any of the above are automatically “good for you”. We say that judicious use of them can prevent, treat or cure particular conditions. For example, I take statins because I have high chloresterol and lifestyle changes did not help. I am not taking chemotherapy because I do not have cancer. So for me as an individual, small doses of statins are “good for me” whereas chemotherapy would be bad for me since I would be getting the side effects but no benefit.

I am hereby challenging the skeptics to a public drink-a-thon, each drinking the medicines we advocate. I’ll meet them in a public place, and we’ll each drink the medicines we believe in the most.

I’ll bring a gallon of homeopathic remedies and healing raw juices, and the medical fundamentalists and their supporters (the more, the merrier) can each bring a gallon of the liquid forms of chemotherapy, blood pressure medications, coumadin, or statin drugs. We’ll chug them in public and see who’s left standing.

And now we have the strawman argument. No sceptic has ever claimed that overdosing on the drugs Adams mentions would be a good idea.

On the subject of “medicines we believe in the most” Adams is normally an enthusiastic peddler of vitamin D as a universal cure all. For some reason he does not offer to drink a bucket of it. Now why could that be?

Oh waht a load of drivel by you a-skeptics. Your physics clas you claim to have had also teaches you that matter cannot be destroyed. Something can never become nothing. Fallacies in reasoning aplenty, without an understanding of either homoeopathy or the subject Mika Adams deals with. Truly pathetic, as usual.

All you have proven is that homoeopathy is safe. When challenged to do a test as is normally done in homoeopathy – take one pill every 2 hours for 3 days maximum or till symptoms appear, you are not ready to do the test. Pathetic again!

Clowns, as usual. pretend to science and don’t understand the basic principles. Pathethic!

I just knew a homeopath would turn up and make with the personal abuse.

What makes you think you know what was taught in my physics classes? Were you there? FTR, we were taught matter-energy equivalence so we were in fact taught that matter can be destroyed – converted to energy.

As for your accusations that I don’t understand the basic principles of science, it seems to me that you are projecting your own failings onto others.

There is massive evidence that supports the success of homeopathic medicine. Most of it long term personal experience of people who have lived a homeopathic lifestyle. Although at the time, the history of mankind on earth, it probably didn’t have a name like homeopathy. My ancestors referred to diet and health as common sense. Now drugs are just a big money making business and so is a lot of homeopathy.

I’ve always been the type of person who wants evidence I can see. I see what so called modern medicine has achieved with synthetic drugs. I see what civilizations did for thousands of years with what we might call the “Tao”. I make my decisions on what to do for my health based on the results of what others have done and studied.

Almost all people develop through emulating others. You grow up wanting to be like, look like, those you admire. All the people I admired growing up were heavy on the side of common sense. So if presented with the choice of a synthetic drugs with some ridiculous amount of side effects and some food, herb, clean water and so on – I think common sense says don’t put your head on what may turn out to be a chopping block.

The other part of the common sense practice says don’t trust anyone who you don’t know. I always ask myself, “What do they stand to gain for selling this – program?” Whatever that program might be, from geopolitical philosophy to personal health ideas.

[…] As usual, the dominant theme was health quackery of one form or another. The year started with fisdkings of Mike Adams’ misunderstanding of the UK health care system here and here. He also demonstrated his limited comprehension abilities in his misunderstanding of the 10:23 campaign fisked here. […]

[…] As usual, the dominant theme was health quackery of one form or another. The year started with fisdkings of Mike Adams’ misunderstanding of the UK health care system here and here. He also demonstrated his limited comprehension abilities in his misunderstanding of the 10:23 campaign fisked here. […]

[…] who believed that he knew more about my own life than I do myself was Kaviraj who claimed he knew the contents of my degree course when I disputed Mike Adams claim that sceptics do not understand the nature of the electron: […]

[…] who believed that he knew more about my own life than I do myself was Kaviraj who claimed he knew the contents of my degree course when I disputed Mike Adams claim that sceptics do not understand the nature of the electron: […]